You mean a compact music player with a 2.5" HDD, room for 5GB of music, with 20 minutes of skip protection, a FireWire port for 50MB per second transfer, a click wheel for navigation, and a user friendly interface? Yes, that was pretty novel in 2002.
1.8" HD. All of the other MP3 players on the market until then had been using 2.5", which was why the iPod seemed so much smaller at launch.
My iPaq had a 1.8" HD sleeve, played mp3s, and browed the web (with a different wifi sleeve..). Plus it had a sunlight readable display.
So they're not just going after the iPad, they're also going after the MacBook Air: The Intel version + Touch Cover was repeatedly shown with the regular desktop and apps on it, and generally spun as a sort of light laptop. Ambitious, and finally makes sense of their Metro/desktop combo OS strategy to a degree. The hardware to go along with it was a missing puzzle piece, and I guess shows just how important it can be…
It strikes me as an entirely natural development and something that will appeal to many consumers. I get the feeling Apple have always wanted iPad to be an extra - an extension to the desktop experience. But the divisions between phone, tablet, "ultralight laptop" and "main laptop" are arbitrary and increasingly opaque. Many people are starting to see tablets and real possible replacements: for light users, it handle…
I've always thought Apple was pretty clear in the direction they were headed when Jobs made his car and trucks analogy at All Things D. The iPad is meant for the 90% of current users as their main device. The PC is for the heavy lifting for those in fields such as audio, video and science. There may be a time where a tablet can meet these needs but I certainly don't think we're close yet.
Are you suggesting this isn't newsworthy? The company behind the most used OS by the mass market on the planet is announcing their own hardware for the next version of their OS. Their own hardware for their own OS is something they haven't done in their ~30 year history. How is this not major news?
Because "Their own hardware" is still just the same crap that all the other manufacturers would have come up with, (and did come up with) for Microsoft to put their badge on. It's not a technological leap forward nor does it drastically alter the user interface paradigm.
Worth seeing, Yes, but definitely not a top of the list worthy post.
Pen+touch+type seems like a great idea. It is something no other manufacturer has tried to do. Apple Newton MessagePad, 1993. It had a stylus, handwriting recognition, you could use it with just your fingertips, and you could connect an external keyboard. http://www.flickr.com/photos/atow/4314242537/ That was almost twenty years a go. Newton was a very expensive experiment for Apple, and they have learned the hard wa…
Yeah, so what? If you read HCI papers from the 90s (it's what I do for a job-- I'm a PhD student in HCI), you'll see that a lot of very respected researchers claimed that speech technology is not useful (their claim is well-founded: it is slow, environmental noise is unavoidable, what to say is often not obvious, and there's the Midas problem). But, here we are, with people praising Siri. It's how technology works--…
For what it's worth: I'm not entirely convinced that Siri will ever work as advertised. I think the new car smell is gone and lately I've read nothing but complaints. Apple really needs to step it up. I expected more of the iOS 6 announcement, like a Siri API for third party apps and better communication between apps. That is what's needed to even come close to the 80s Knowledge Navigator idea. I mean, the dictation part is nice, but otherwise, I haven't found much use for Siri.
My wife has a bad back, and even carrying a 13" laptop around for and extended time causes her a lot of pain. She would kill for a tablet with a keyboard that she could use for work while traveling (mostly, power point, word and a bit of Excel).
Now, if only her company (60k+ employees) would upgrade from XP...
You mean a compact music player with a 2.5" HDD, room for 5GB of music, with 20 minutes of skip protection, a FireWire port for 50MB per second transfer, a click wheel for navigation, and a user friendly interface? Yes, that was pretty novel in 2002.
I had an Archos before the iPod came out. A tiny bit bigger than the iPod would be, but a 30gb hard drive, usb 2.0, and a much better way to find music than a wheel.
Archos killed the iPod. The iPod was one of the first times I distinctly recall thinking that actual fashion (like Vogue magazine) could trump pragmatics and technology in the tech sector.
A lot of people try to compete against Apple in design. Wrong. Apple isn't doing design, as much as they're doing fashion.
Can't wait to see how well the Pro version runs with Norton or McAfee burning up cpu cycles. Hope that's not the "desktop" experience they're aiming for.
Win8 comes with built-in antivirus. But of course you can buy Norton or McAfee if you like. In which case you have bigger problems than your CPU cycles.
This would have been great a couple of years ago, but it's too late to bring out something that's almost as good as an iPad, but without the momentum or ecosystem. This was clearly designed by people who still don't understand why the iPad has been such a big success, and think the world is just waiting for an iPad running Windows. This is a desperation move, like the Zune, and will have the same effect on third part…
All they need is a good product at a lower price. iOS struggles at the tablet form factor. Great for phones, too limited for tablets. No, too limited to be the "main machine". Much of that is apple's fault for locking it down too far.
"too limited for tablets."
mkay. I think the market disagrees with you a bit. And your strawman about being the "main machine" is contrary to Apple's goals. They would like nothing better than to sell you an iPhone, iPad and MacBook.
I don't think MS is going after MBA. sure, keyboard may be nicer than bt keyboard for ipad, but that doesn't make it a laptop replacement. the os -- windows rt -- may be as restrictive as ipad is, quite different from the windows for desktop. There is nothing inspiring in this product, at least they didn't answer a question: is there something new we can do with this tablet?
You're making a bunch of key mistakes there: a) Only the ARM version is running Windows RT. The Intel version I wrote about is using "Windows 8 Pro", which contains the regular Windows desktop. b) A BT keyboard for the iPad is something you need to select separately, and schlepp around inconveniently. A cover goes together with the device. Stuff like this matters. As for whether it's doing anything new, dunno. The th…
Honestly I didn't know about a), so thanks for pointing out my mistake.
I just think keyboard cover is overrated in your argument. After all, it is peripheral, iPad can have one too, but that alone doesn't make a MBA killer. Low price + Unrestricted platform (open for all kinds of peripheral development) is the killer weapon. Oh, those USB ports are very nice.
It strikes me as an entirely natural development and something that will appeal to many consumers. I get the feeling Apple have always wanted iPad to be an extra - an extension to the desktop experience. But the divisions between phone, tablet, "ultralight laptop" and "main laptop" are arbitrary and increasingly opaque. Many people are starting to see tablets and real possible replacements: for light users, it handle…
I've always thought Apple was pretty clear in the direction they were headed when Jobs made his car and trucks analogy at All Things D. The iPad is meant for the 90% of current users as their main device. The PC is for the heavy lifting for those in fields such as audio, video and science. There may be a time where a tablet can meet these needs but I certainly don't think we're close yet.
One thing about Jobs... he was good at saying, "XYZ is a bad idea" right up until the day he announces "we're doing XYZ and it will change the world".
Once Apple can get iOS working well on x86, they'll do the same.